Latest Exhibition: Unform, Reform, Inform, Deform

My latest exhibition continues to play with mutable elements, this time developed and arranged specific to an architectural office (Joel Berman Architecture and Design) here in Chicago during Andersonville Arts Weekend (it's still up, btw) as part of Chicago Artists Month.

Mutability – translating walking in and around a building and opportunities to change positions into imagery – informs the observations, structures and possible juxtapositions.

Catch site of the Wrigley Building from a certain angle, and one half appears as a plane – flat -- until the dimensional block of the clock tower unfolds behind it; the two towers connected by a bridge push against one another, reminiscent of folded paper. Musings like this led to mental play with Chicago buildings as flat and as dimensional shapes, folding and unfolding the shapes, and then to physical manipulation of forms based upon these shapes.

Surveying architectural detail as silhouettes coalesced around bird forms in the Tribune Tower’s doors; and thereafter, bird or bird-like forms seemed to pop up everywhere, some actual and some perhaps more conjured in the detailing, from the owl atop the Harold Washington Library to the winged form in the prairie style Healy Building to Sullivan’s owl-like detailing on the Carson Pirie Scott Building. Some buildings themselves seemed to take on a bird like appearances. Losing the buildings among the birds rescaled the relation between the two.

It’s a fact of life that unfortunate birds regularly slam into glass windows of buildings, and a less known fact that Peregrine falcons were transplanted to roost on city buildings to improve their numbers.